All with a sense of the ridiculous, keen yet charitable - Thomas Hardy's Human Shows

Thomas Hardy’s Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles (1925) is the second of the three books Hardy wrote and assembled in his eighties.  It is almost exactly like the first one, Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses (1922).  There are a few poems, polished up, I assume, originating in the 1860s, a few from later in the 19th century, a few about Hardy’s first wife, a few about the war.  Mostly, though, the poems were written since the last book.  (These last two sentences describe both collections, and I bet will work for Hardy’s last book, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (1928) as well.

The verse is all formal, and in a variety of forms, with lots of surprising line breaks and line lengths, lots for the eye and ear to do.  The subjects are failed love affairs, graces, and music.  Some Wessex, some London.  Two poems are narrated by dogs, which I believe is a new touch:

‘Why She Moved House’

          (The Dog Muses)

Why she moved house, without a word,
    I cannot understand;
She’d mirrors, flowers, she’d book and bird,
    And callers in a band.

And where she is she gets no sun,
    No flowers, no book, no glass;
Of callers I am the only one,
    And I but pause and pass.

In his “Introductory Note” to his next book, Hardy complains about critics missing the “flippant, not to say farcical pieces in this collection [meaning Human Shows],” although he will not say they had “wilfully misrepresented the book… knowing well that they could not have read it,” which seems like a wise guess about a lot of criticism.

Anyway, there is a lot of humor in Human Shows, of the human folly type:

All with a sense of the ridiculous, keen yet charitable;
In brief, a rich, profuse attractiveness unnarratable.

This is from “A Watering-place Lady Inventoried,” which as the title suggests is satirical, although of whom, I wonder, given these lines:

Till a cynic would find her amiability provoking,
Tempting him to indulge in mean and wicked joking.

A six-poem sequence of winter poems was a highlight for me, winters from the 1920s, winters from the past:

    The steps are a blanched slope,
    Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
        And we take him in.  (from “Snow in the Suburbs”)

Come to think of it, there is more love of animals in this collection than usual, including a poem written to support the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.  Here’s more snow:

The snow-feathers so gently swoop that though
            But half an hour ago
The road was brown, and now is starkly white,
A watcher would have failed defining quite
            When it was transformed so.  (from “A Light Snow-fall after Frost”)

And how about one that ends, to remind me that this is Hardy, with a long-ago death:

While she who grieved
At the sad lot
Of her pretty plants –
Cold, iced, forgot –
Herself is colder,
And knows it not.  (from “The Frozen Greenhouse”)

If I were assembling a long selection of Hardy’s poems, I would include lots from Human Shows; if a short selection, possibly none, since I would have already picked plenty of similar poems from earlier books.  Here, said Hardy, have more, which from a man his age was a gift.

The grimful glee of Hardy's Later Lyrics

Late Lyrics and Earlier, with Many Other Verses (1922) by Thomas Hardy, his sixth book of lyric poems.  Hardy was something like eighty-two years old.  “Late lyrics” means written since his last book, Moments of Vision from 1917; “earlier” means written before that, mostly in the 1910s; “many other” seems logically redundant and means I know not what.

For context, 1922 is the year of The Waste-Land and Trilce and just a bit before Spring and All, Tulips and Chimneys, and The Duino Elegies.  Hardy has nothing to do with that stuff.  This book has two basic modes, one purely lyric, one narrative – maybe those are the “others.”  All Hardy poems, much like earlier Hardy poems.

The lyric mode is at this point as song-like as Hardy has ever been.  Many poems seem intended to lend themselves to music, perhaps existing hymns or folksongs.  Many are in some way about music, a theme that runs through the book:

from “The Curtains Now Are Drawn”

    I stand here in the rain,
    With its smite upon her stone,
    And the grasses that have grown
    Over women, children, men,
    And their texts that ‘Life is vain’;
    But I hear the notes as when
        Once she sang to me:
‘O the dream that thou art my Love, be it thine,
And the dream that I am thy Love, be it mine,
And death may come, but loving is divine.’

That is the second stanza; the woman is of course alive in the first.  Hardy poems are full of graves.  These have more singing and playing.  Benjamin Britten picked out “At the Railway Station, Upway” for his Winter Words song settings(1953), in which a boy fiddler at a train station plays a tune that causes a funny reaction in another man on the platform:

    The man in the handcuffs smiled;
The constable looked, and he smiled, too,
    As the fiddle began to twang;
And the man in handcuffs suddenly sang
                With grimful glee:
                ‘This life so free
                Is the thing for me!’
And the constable smiles and said no word
As if unconscious of what he heard;
And so they went on till the train came in
The convict, and boy with the violin.

Again, that is the second stanza.  The first is entirely about the boy.  The convict and constable are introduced as we see here, and a little story pops out, the music mixing with the narrative.

“Grimful glee” is a good description of a number of Hardy stories, including many in this book, narrative poems with plots that could easily have found their way into a theoretical Hardy novel, if he had not given up prose fiction twenty-five years earlier.  “The Chapel-Organist,” for example, in which a sexually promiscuous woman finally offends the church elders to the point that she won’t be allowed to play the organ anymore; she poisons herself and dies at the climax of her final performance.  Ludicrous but Hardy has a way of making the ludicrous tragic.

Another hilarious one, where I almost wish there were a novel, is “A Woman’s Fancy.”  A woman visiting a spa town is mistaken for the runaway wife of a man who just died.  They think she has returned out of guilt.  Because no one will believe her denials, and everyone talks to her about nothing but how pitiful her husband was, she falls in love with him – the dead man – and begins visiting his grave with “a bereaved wife’s sorrow.”  At the end of the poem, she is buried with him – “’Call me by his name on the stone!’”

The last poem in the book, “Surview,” has the poet hearing his own voice in a fire.  The fire chides him for betraying his ideals, and then dies:

    And the sticks burnt low, and the fire went out,
        And my voice ceased talking to me.

Those are the last lines of the book.  I suppose every book had to be thought of as the last one, the dying of the fire.  Hardy would publish one more book of poems and have another ready when he died.

an artistic and tender finish - Hardy wraps up his fiction

How incomparably the immaterial dream dwarfed the grandest of substantial things, when here, between those three sublimities – the sky, the rock, and the ocean – the minute personality of this washer-girl filled his consciousness to its extremest boundary, and the stupendous inanimate scene shrank to a corner therein.  (II.viii.)

That’s not a bad single-sentence summary of The Well-Beloved from right in the middle of the novel, when the sculptor Pierston is at his most solipsistic.  This is when he is in his forties, pursuing the twenty-year-old daughter of the woman he jilted long ago.  The form of the novel shapes my response to his solipsism.  Hardy’s rocks and oceans feel as real as his characters; the washer-girl seems as real as Pierston.  More so, honestly.

Pierston idealizes women to the extent that he becomes the idealized, unrealistic character.  Early in the novel, Pierston confesses his pursuit of the imaginary Well-Beloved, who flits from woman to woman, to a more grounded friend, and is told that he is merely male and not that special.  “’You are like other men, only rather worse’” (I.vii.).  Just what I had been thinking!

Hardy routinely undercuts his protagonist.  Just after the quotation up top, the washer-girl openly tells him that she herself is pretty flighty (“’I have loved fifteen a’ready!’”) but that Pierston is “’handsome and gentlemanly’” but “’too old’” – “’But you asked me, sir!’ she expostulated.”

“I have paid the penalty!” he said sadly.  “Men of my sort always get the worst of it somehow.”  (II.xii.)

Meanwhile the rest of the novel demonstrates the exact opposite.

If Pierston is too old in his forties, Hardy needs some help to make the final section credible, when he is in his sixties pursuing the Well-Beloved in the form of the twenty-year-old daughter of the washer-girl, the granddaughter of the woman he jilted in the early chapters.  In a clever twist, the mother, ill and worn down, gets caught up in the romance of the novel.  She pressures her daughter to marry Pierston, thinking it will somehow make up for all of the various disappointments of the past forty years.

Rejecting the first Avice, the second had rejected him, and to rally the third with final achievement was an artistic and tender finish to which it was ungrateful in anybody to be blind.  (III.vi.)

These are the thoughts of that “second,” who rejected Pierston.  She is the one seduced by the artistic finish, the satisfying happy ending, because it makes a good story.  Luckily, her daughter, in line with the rest of the novel, is made of less dreamy stuff and is able to make her own ending.

Hardy returns to this idea at the novel’s end, in a kind of coda:

“That’s how people are – wanting to round off other people’s histories in the best machine-made conventional manner.”  (III.viii.)

Unsurprisingly, Hardy resists this temptation.  Remembering that The Well-Beloved is in some sense Hardy’s last published prose fiction, the last line looks like it serves more than one purpose:

At present he is sometimes mentioned as the “late Mr. Pierston” by gourd-like young art-critics and journalists; and his productions are alluded to as those of a man not without genius, whose powers were insufficiently recognized in his lifetime.

(“Gourd-like”?)

She was indescribable - Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved

Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved was published twice, serially in 1892 and as a book, revised – much revised? – in 1897, placing it among his problematic late novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895).  By “problematic,” I mean the problem facing Hardy, his frustration with the form of the novel, which was proving incapable of doing some of the things he wanted it to do.  Like a number of his contemporaries, he wanted prose to do what poetry did.  Sometimes he succeeded, sometimes not.  Eventually, he realized it would be easier to just be the greatest living English poet.

But now he is still writing odd Shelley-steeped novels.

All now stood dazzlingly unique and white against the tinted sea, and the sun flashed on infinitely stratified walls of oolite,
                                      The melancholy ruins
                    Of cancelled cycles…
with a distinctiveness that called the eyes to it as strongly as any spectacle he had beheld afar. (I.i.)

A little bit of “Prometheus Unbound” there.  That rock, that sea, they’re part of the rugged, stony “Isle” of Portland, a Wessex setting handled with as much art as in Hardy’s better known books.

The canine gnawing audible on the Pebble-bank had been repeated ever since at each tide, but the pebbles remained undevoured…

…  he stood once again at the foot of the familiar steep whereon the houses at the entrance to the Isle were perched like grey pigeons on a roof-side.  (III.i.)

“Canine gnawing,” that’s good stuff, yes?  Hardy mines the setting for all of the thematic weight it can carry.  The protagonist is a sculptor, the son of a quarryman, a child of the famous Portland stone.  He escapes to London, to art, to the Academy, but is constantly pulled back to his childhood home by self-pity and girl trouble, specifically his notion that he falls in love not with individual women but with an abstract Well-Beloved who temporarily inhabits specific women.

Essentially she was perhaps of no tangible substance; a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a light of the eye, a parting of the lips.  God only knew what she really was; Pierston did not.  She was indescribable.  (I.ii.)

Embodiments in three women from his home, twenty years apart, Avice, her daughter, and her granddaughter, make up the story of the novel.  In his twenties, he is a dog; in his forties, pursuing the twenty-year-old daughter of an old flame, he is creepy; in his sixties, engaged to the granddaughter of the first Avice, he becomes merely pathetic, and thus learns something about loving individual people rather than idealized figures and abstract ideas.

The novel is a long critique of Pierston’s tendency towards abstraction and desire for perfection.  The idealistic artist is constantly pulled down into the messier form of the novel.  The governing idea, the three sections, twenty years apart, the small cast, make this a strange kind of novel.  A chamber piece.  A romance in the sense of a fantasy, although in a solid setting.

Eight years ago, I had read one of Hardy’s books.  Now I have read twelve of them, and The Well-Beloved is the first one where I thought: Boy I am glad I did not read this one first.  It helped to have read some of the books around it.

Tomorrow I will extend or justify or at least mess with a couple of these ideas.

part of the pattern in the great web of human doings - Hardy can't describe moss

In a way my favorite description in The Woodlanders is the one where Hardy’s narrator admits defeat:

Further on were other tufts of moss in islands divided by the shed leaves – variety upon variety, dark green and pale green; moss like little fir-trees, like plush, like malachite stars; like nothing on earth except moss.  (Ch. 42)

He piles on the metaphors, but in the end the moss overwhelms his baroque poeticism.

Hardy piles them onto his characters, too, not to describe their appearance but their – what? – their position in the universe.

In this room sat she who had been the maiden Grace Melbury till the finger of fate touched her and turned her to a wife.  (Ch. 25)

The scene to him was not the material environment of his person, but a tragic vision that travelled with him like an envelope.  (Ch. 32)

Several times the characters are moved into Norse mythology, as when Grace tries to attract the attention of the wood-God, Giles, while he is high up in a tree, “motionless and silent in that gloomy Niflheim or fog-land which involved him” (Ch. 13).  The tree is not lost in the fog – Giles is perfectly visible from below – but rather the character’s mind.

Thus the primary mechanism of the plot, the means of separating characters who should marry and pushing them towards those they should not, is a constant series of small misunderstandings.  “Grace had been wrong – very far wrong – in assuming that…” (Ch. 39), and it hardly matters what she is wrong about in this case.  The same line could be used throughout the novel, substituting other characters for Grace.  Characters do not quite see what they should, or see it and make the wrong interpretation.

I thought the strongest ethical argument to emerge from the novel – no idea if Hardy had it in mind – was the importance of allowing multiple interpretations of the behavior of other people.  Maybe even be generous.  The characters in The Woodlanders like to pick one possibility and cling to it.

And yet, looked at in a certain way, their lonely courses formed no detached design at all, but were part of the pattern in the great web of human doings then weaving in both hemispheres, from the White Sea to Cape Horn. (Ch. 3)

In the first chapter, the narrator even declares that the forest village sees “dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean,” which now seems like over-promising.  The scale of The Woodlanders is human, compared to the cosmic horror of Tess of the d’Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure, or even to the long reach of history as in The Mayor of Casterbridge.  The pagan relics and Roman ruins are not so visible among the trees.

In an 1895 Preface, Hardy claims that The Woodlanders is about “the question of matrimonial divergence, the immortal puzzle – given the man and woman, how to find a basis for their sexual relation.”  If that were the case, he could have handled it with a lot less fuss.

I’ll take a couple of days off for the holiday.  Happy Thanksgiving.

excited thumbs now fleshless in the grave - the winter day emerged like a dead-born child - Hardy describes things

With The Woodlanders, I’ll skip the classic bad Hardy sentences, having made any point I might have back when I wrote about Tess of the d’Urbervilles, except for this wonderful specimen:

But to give the lie to her assertion she was seized with lachrymose twitches, that soon produced a dribbling face.  (Ch. 45)

Isn’t that something?  It is like a riddle.  I can see how a good Hardy reader develops a taste for these.  I may have developed a taste for them.

The descriptive passages in The Woodlanders have a strong flavor.  The narrator can sound nuts:

There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged like a dead-born child…  Owls that had been catching mice in the outhouses, rabbits that had been eating the winter-greens in the gardens, and stoats that had been sucking the blood of the rabbits, discerning that their human neighbours were on the move discreetly withdrew from publicity, and were seen and heard no more from nightfall.  (Ch. 4)

The novel has barely begun, and the sun is rising like a dead baby.  Nothing in the story, at this early point, matches the bleak imagery of the narrator, nor is this specific foreshadowing.  It is the narrator seeing something that his characters cannot see. His paganism is les explicit than in The Return of the Native, less attached to the characters, however much one resembles a fruit-god, but is often present in the descriptions:

… slimy streams of green moisture, exuding from decayed holes caused by old amputations, ran down the bark of the oaks and elms, the rind below being coated with a lichenous wash as green as emerald.   They were stout-trunked trees, that never rocked their stems in the fiercest gale, responding to it entirely by crooking their limbs.  Wrinkled like an old crone's face, and antlered with dead branches that rose above the foliage of their summits, they were nevertheless still green – though yellow had invaded the leaves of other trees. (Ch. 27)

The trees are consistently interesting and strange.  Two exhausted women are lost in the woods at night, cold, so that they “clasped each other closely.”  Overhead, “the funereal trees rocked and chanted dirges unceasingly” (Ch. 33).  Again, the trees seem to know something that the characters do not.

It is not just the forest that is fun.  Look at these old playing cards

that had been lying by in a drawer ever since the time that Giles’s grandmother was alive.  Each card had a great stain in the middle of its back, produced by the touch of generations of damp and excited thumbs now fleshless in the grave; and the kings and queens wore a decayed expression of feature, as if they were rather an impecunious dethroned dynasty hiding in obscure slums than real regal characters.  (Ch. 10)

Which I suppose is closer to what they are.  Yes, yesterday I quoted a different passage that invoked “a city slum.”  They are the only two in the novel.  I do not understand how they might be connected, and am puzzled by every mention of the city in this profoundly rural and sylvan novel, where the characters, plot, imagery, and language are all tangled in the depths of forest.

“She may shail, but she'll never wamble” - Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders

Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (1887), is the book I recently read; my sixth Hardy novel, it means I have moved to the second tier of fame if not quality.  I thought it as good as the more famous Wessex novels that preceded it, like The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886).  What it does not have, perhaps, is a character as gigantic and alive as The Return of the Native’s Eustacia Vye or Casterbridge’s Henchard or Tess.  Maybe a bigger Hardy fan than I am has insight into this mystery.  I enjoyed The Woodlanders as much as any of the others, but enjoyment only goes so far.

The forest setting of The Woodlanders is as exciting and metaphorically rich as is at this point typical in Hardy.  It is not as ceaselessly strange as Egdon Heath in Native, but is otherwise as interesting.  It is pretty strange:

They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled through interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with spreading roots, whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves; elbowed old elms and ashes with great forks, in which stood pools of water that overflowed on rainy days, and ran down their stems in green cascades.  On older trees still than these, huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs.  Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum.  (Ch. 7)

The moss, fungi, slugs – lotta slugs in this novel – and the strange sounds of the trees add weirdness to many of the best descriptive passages in the book.  I’ll do another post on the scenery, as good as any Hardy writing I remember.

Now that I have read six Hardy novels I finally see how he repeats himself, rearranging character and story elements in new combinations.  A forester, Giles Winterborne, takes on a Tess-like role, his luck constantly bad, fate always working against him, but merely fate, not Fate.  His bad luck is less cosmically meaningful than Tess’s.  Grace Melbury is like Native’s Eustacia Vye, educated out of her place in the landscape, educated away from Giles –

He rose upon her memory as the fruit-god and the wood-god in alternation; sometimes leafy, and smeared with green lichen, as she had seen him amongst the sappy boughs of the plantations; sometimes cider-stained and starred with apple-pips…  (Ch. 38)

– and towards something less leafy, specifically a demonic doctor.  They “meet cute” over an old lady’s severed head, which is pretty odd.  Much of the story of the novel is built out of the pull on Grace between the wood-god and the doctor.  As Grace’s parents say:

“Fancy her white hands getting redder every day, and her tongue losing its pretty up-country curl in talking, and her bounding walk becoming the regular Hintock shail and wamble!”

“She may shail, but she'll never wamble,” replied his wife, decisively.  (Ch. 11)

Exactly!  Much of the rest of the story comes from the doctor being a total hound dog, a story as old as any fruit-god.

there are strange strange things in being - Hardy's Moments of Visions

Byron’s poems of 1816 would be the next logical post, but I need to reread them.  It was a big year for him.

So, to something different, something I just read, a book from a century later, Thomas Hardy’s Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917).  Maybe I should stick to badly remembered Byron, though, because I do not feel I read Moments of Vision well.  The poems are, in general, too good.  Good poem after good poem, page after page.  The verse forms vary, the subject matter varies, the tone varies.  Yet some bad poems would have helped me see the better ones.

A code contains a bundle of political poems, tossed off for the war effort or refugee relief, with titles like “An Appeal to America on Behalf of the Belgian Destitute.”  These poems are weak enough that when I came to “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’” I could see it for what it was:

                    1
Only a man harrowing clods
  In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
  Half asleep as they stalk.

                    2
Only thin smoke without flame
  From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
  Though dynasties pass.

                  3
Yonder a maid and her wight
  Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
  Ere their story die.

And I call Hardy a pessimist!  This is about the cheeriest thing I have ever seen from him, an “earth abides” sentiment.

The main body of poems include a number about the courtship and early years of Hardy’s first marriage, a look back to the 1870s, but not in a way that creates a narrative, but rather a lot of movement in time.  Plenty of poems could be versified bits of theoretical Hardy novels. “The Head above the Fog,” for example, is exactly the kind of image I most enjoy in his fiction:

    Something I do see
Above the fog that sheets the mead,
A figure like to life indeed,
Moving along with spectre-speed,
    Seen by none but me.

The approaching woman, “[m]ere ghostly head as it skims along,” is either the woman the poet loves or her ghost – with just a head, and “hat and plume above / The evening fog-fleece” it is hard to tell.  Scene, or memory of a scene?

“Midnight on the Great Western” is another vivid poem:

In the band of his hat a journeying boy
        Had a ticket stuck; and a string
Around his neck bore the key of his box,
That twinkled gleams of the lamp’s sad beams
                Like a living thing.

Why it’s Little Father Time from Jude the Obscure!  Run for your life!  No, here he is just a boy taking a train trip by himself, “[b]ewrapt past knowing to what he was going.”

I was struck by “He Prefers Her Earthly” in part because I had just read Shelley’s “Alastor,” where a real woman is rejected for an ideal.  The narrator of this poem knows that is foolishness.  He sees a lost love in a sunset – presumably she is dead:

This after-sunset is a sight for seeing,
Cliff-heads of craggy cloud surrounding it.
    – And dwell you in that glory-show?
You may; for there are strange strange things in being,
                Stranger than I know.

But however beautiful or perfect she may be as a “firmament-riding earthly essence,” he wishes she were here, now, “as the one you were.”

If I were serious about Hardy, I would write a squib about each poem, as my only hope at remembering them.

Tess's paintings - the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum

I am looking at Thomas Hardy: The World of His Novels (2013, Frances Lincoln Limited) by J. B. Bullen, an English Professor at Royal Holloway University of London.  Looking at much more than reading, since the book features many images, mostly Bullen’s own photos showing the correspondences between Hardy’s fantasy world and what for the sake of argument I will call the real world.  For example, here is the real Cross-in-Hand pillar, “desolate and silent,” “the site of a miracle, or murder, or both” (Ch. 44), from a public photo, not Bullen’s.  An essential book for planning your walking tour of Wessex.  Don’t lose your boots.

Much of Tess of the d’Urbervilles chapter is spent on a different kind of image, as Bullen works through references to a number of J. M. W. Turner paintings; some are speculation, some are sure things.  It is all tied into the sun theme.  I knew it.  I noticed the sun motif too late.

Tess is full of paintings.  In a comment, Trednyas Days points to a good example:

Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence.  (Ch. 13)

Those are some calm pheasants.  Hardy could be inventing the entire scene, but its explicitly allegorical nature makes me suspect he has a painting in mind.  Perhaps something he saw in Belgium.

I noticed the narrator twice referring to Belgian painters, a surprising theme.  In Chapter 16, he describes the Valley of the Dairies as “speckled as thickly with them [cows] as a canvas by Van Alsloot or Sallaert with burghers,” and in Chapter 39, in one of the oddest lines in the novel, the disillusionment of Angel Clare is described in terms of painting:

Nevertheless humanity stood before him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with the leer of a study by Van Beers.

“Ghastly” is an interesting word to trace through Tess, but I’ll stick with the paintings.  Antoine Wiertz, judging by his most famous painting, was the greatest painter of the 19th century, but do not be too hasty – he was more typically terrible.  I have pulled a detail from the mammoth The Greeks and the Trojans Fighting over the Body of Patroclus which may be the kind of thing on Hardy’s mind.  The harmless Jan van Beers (“a minor Belgian painter,” the Norton editor deadpans in a footnote) is more of a puzzle.  Maybe this is a leer?

Angel Clare’s understanding of Italian art is pretty narrow, I’ll say that.

What puzzles me most about the explicit use (Turner is never named) of the Flemish and Belgian painters is what readers of Tess made of them.  Were Van Alsloot and Van Beers commonly understood references?  Did readers think “Oh, like Wiertz, what a shocking view of life”?  I know that today’s readers, the ones who love Tess, have looked up these artists and can answer my questions about them.  But how about the late Victorian readers?  I need another book.

What was comedy to them was tragedy to her - Tess versus McFate, round 2

Tess Durbeyfield is pursued in Tess of the d’Urbervilles by three men, Angel Clare, Devil d’Urberville, and an unnamed narrator who represents, or is, or thinks he is, Destiny, or Aubrey McFate, as Humbert Humbert calls him in Lolita.

An innocent amateur genealogist tells Tess’s father that the Durbeyfields “derive their descent from Sir Pagan d’Urberville,” a Norman knight.  The d’Urbervilles are gone, dead, but through a long series of small and large incidents, beginning with her father having a drink or two or three to celebrate his nobility, Tess’s life is ruined.  Tess has the worst luck, again and again.  At first she does not understand that Fate has it in for her:

Tess Durbeyfield did not divine…  that there behind the blue narcotic haze was potentially the ‘tragic mischief’ of her drama – one who stood fair to be the blood-red ray* in the spectrum of her young life.  (Ch. 4)

That’s Devil d’Urberville standing there emitting smoke.  Tess hardly would know any of that, would she, since she literally just met the fellow.  But McFate knows, and needs to tell me he knows.

Had she perceived this meeting’s import she might have asked why she was doomed to be seen and coveted that day by the wrong man, and not by some other man, the right and desired one in all [meaning Angel Clare, who will pop up later].

The narrator frequently interrupts to say how characters made the wrong decision.  He berates Angel Clare at the end of Chapter 39 for his treatment of Tess – and it would be hard to find a reader who disagrees with the narrator – but what can you do, “this advanced and well-meaning young man, a sample product of the last five-and-twenty years, was yet the slave to custom and conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings.”

McFate is at his cruelest in Chapter 44, part of Tess’s long walk, where after a series of pathetic setbacks the narrator says “she went her way without knowing that the greatest misfortune of her life was this feminine loss of courage at the last and critical moment…” [emphasis mine].  Yes, Tess could have been happy – relieved from her suffering, allowed a more ordinary life – if only – there are a lot of “if only”s, many branches to the story that get lopped off.

The narrator is openly in conflict with Tess.  Much earlier in the novel, Tess declared that she refused to study history, because history is the study of Fate, and she would rather not know:

“Because what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row only – finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that’s all.  The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands’ and thousands’, and that your coming life and doings’ll be like thousands’ and thousands’.”  (Ch. 19)

She will embrace the illusion of her existence, the illusion of her will, no matter how often the narrator insists it is an illusion, no matter if he is right.  Perhaps this is why Tess feels so alive compared to the other characters in the novel – compared to most characters in most novels.  The illusion fights back against the illusionist.  She is the predecessor of Professor Pnin, who ends up fleeing his own novel to escape the cruel narrator.  Tess figures out how to escape her novel, too.

My title is from Chapter 29, just barely nudged out of context, and a good description of how I read Tess – I’m one of “them.”

* See end of Stonehenge scene, Ch. 58.  Note for next time – keep track of sun references.

She was not an existence, an experience - the narrator versus Tess - plus bonus layer of live rats

Writing yesterday about Tess of the d’Urbervilles at its wildest, I stopped before using the scene with this line: “But there was another hour’s work before the layer of live rats at the base of the stack would be reached; and [nice description of the moon]” (Ch. 48).  I have not yet found a book blogger quoting this line.  What novel were they reading?

I am hopping back to the Criticism in my outstanding Norton Critical Edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles.  What drives Dorothy Van Ghent crazy (from her book The English Novel: Form and Function (1953)), the “elements resistant to aesthetic cohesion” – she is so polite – that most bothers her, are the narrator’s invocations of poems.  Quotes from Wordsworth or Browning or Swinburne or whomever.  Tess, though she is reduced to swede-grubbing, is not uneducated. She could handle the quotations.  It is the surrounding lecture that “belongs to an intellectual battlefield alien from the novel’s imaginative concretions” (p. 428).

Tess and her family are moving – the subsequent scene, the description of the country-wide moving day, is outstanding – and they are singing a hymn that is sad but offers the hope of heaven.  Tess has spent the length of the novel suffering, so she does not share their hope:

for to Tess, as to not a few millions of others, there was a ghastly satire in the poet’s lines–
                Not in utter nakedness
                But trailing clouds of glory do we come.  [“Ode. Intimations of Immortality,” ll. 63-4]
To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify, and at best could only palliate.  (Ch. 51)

A classic statement of Hardyan pessimism.  What needles Van Ghent is not just the intrusion of the philosophical statement, but the anti-novelistic introduction of the “millions” and “her like.”  “[I]n what way do these statistical generalizations add to the already sufficient meaning of Tess’s situation?” (p. 429).  The novel is about Tess, Tess, Tess.  Any philosophical work needs to be done through her.  If Wordsworth is helpful, show us Tess reading Wordsworth.

Not that the narrator needs Wordsworth.  Nor does Tess.  Much earlier in the novel, after Tess has suffered her second, I think, great trauma, she is recovering.  She has resolved “to be useful again”; she has made some peace with an indifferent world.

The past was past; whatever it had been it was no more at hand.  Whatever its consequences, time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten.  (Ch. 14)

A little jolt there at the end.  It is all pretty clearly Tess.  Yet the narrator is not satisfied.  She has not gone far enough for him.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly – the thought of the world’s concern at her situation [unmarried mother] – was founded on an illusion.  She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself.  To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought…  Most of her misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations.

I suppose it would be hard to find readers now who think badly of Tess because she had a child out of wedlock.  The “conventional aspect” has changed a lot.  But the narrator is after something else.  This is the side that Van Ghent finds bullying.  I do, too.  I found myself fighting with the narrator a lot, and not with his artlessness, whatever that might mean.  This structure, the narrator who tells the story but becomes frustrated that it does not say exactly what he wants it to say, is pretty interesting.

The narrator is fundamentally wrong.  He mistakes the illusion.  Tess was an existence, rather more than a passing thought, to me, while reading the novel.

where the snow smells like whales - Tess's vegeto-human pollen - Hardy, the great fantasy novelist

Where The Return of the Native (1878) burrowed into a single strange landscape, Egdon Heath, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) takes its heroine on a tour of central Wessex, so Hardy can describe a series of weird places.  I am reading William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End (1896), which is entirely invented, and there has not been anything nearly so weird.  Early going, I hope.  Hardy’s fantasy novel is much more fantastic.

A valley that is a center of dairy production, sending cans of milk to London by train, I suppose a pretty ordinary place, is turned into a biology experiment:

Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not grow passionate.  The ready bosoms existing there were impregnated by their surroundings.  (Ch. 24)

The milkmaids “writhed feverishly” in a landscape “which sent up mists of pollen at a touch” (I’m mixing chapters – 23 first, then Ch. 19).  People mate like plants.  In an earlier landscape, a hay harvest, the “floating, fusty débris of peat and hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of the dancers” form “a sort of vegeto-human pollen” (Ch. 11).

The contrast is so strange, the Anglo-Celtic level of the story, the milk and turnip level, wrestling with the educated narrator who has a sharp enough ear to note that the sound of the dancing is muffled “from their being overshoe in ‘scroff’” – peat dust – “They coughed as they danced, and laughed as they coughed” – but also can’t stop himself from dragging in the satyrs and nymphs, “Lotis attempting to elude Priapus.”

Ah, just a page earlier is that beautiful sunset, “when yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hair-like lines, and the atmosphere itself forms a prospect without aid from more solid objects, except the innumerable winged insects that danced in it.”  I rarely understand what is meant when a book is described as “atmospheric,” but in Tess of the d’Urbervilles the atmosphere is a constant presence, a motivating force.

The masterpiece is the description of Flintcomb-Ash, the turnip farm, “a starve-acre place” where the fields are full of “bulbous, cusped, and phallic” rocks, the migrating birds come direct from the North Pole, “gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes – eyes which had witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar regions of a magnitude such as no human being has ever conceived” and the snow that follows the birds like a “white pillar of cloud,” a Biblical snow, “smelt of icebergs, arctic seas, whales, and white bears” (Ch. 43).

The snow smells like whales.  What were those idiots in the previous post talking about?  Hardy is awesome.  How could Robert Louis Stevenson, of all people, not experience some pleasing surprise when reading about that blizzard under a palm tree?

How this all fits together is still a puzzle to me.  Another piece tomorrow.

sundry gnomic texts and phrases - the botched and bungled Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Everybody has to establish how badly Thomas Hardy writes.  “The novels therefore are full of inequalities; they are lumpish and dull and inexpressive…  It is as if Hardy himself were not quite aware of what he did…” (400-1) writes Virginia Woolf.  “The book [Tess of the d’Urbervilles] is handled with very uncertain skill, botched and bungled” moans D. H. Lawrence, who loves Hardy (410).  “I will say that Tess is one of the worst, weakest, least sane, most voulu [forced] books I have yet read” howls Robert Louis Stevenson.  Hoots Henry James, in reply:

But oh yes, dear Louis, she is vile.  The pretence of “sexuality” is only equaled by the absence of it, and the abomination of language by the author’s reputation for style.  There are indeed some pretty smells and sights and sounds.  But you have better ones in Polynesia.  (388, the James and Stevenson from letters, not reviews)

The page numbers refer to the “Criticism” section of the 1979 Norton Critical Edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the 1891 novel in which Hardy leads, cajoles, and forcefully shoves poor Tess, the unluckiest heroine in English literature, to her Doom.  The incessance of the Hardy-bashing amidst – as part of – the serious attempts to understand Hardy are clearly an editorial decision.  Perhaps the editor is letting undergraduates know that it is okay to loathe Hardy’s writing.  Now, get that out of your system and, like Lawrence and Woolf and many others, move forward.

I have come across Hardy fans who deny that the bad Hardy sentence exists.  I wonder what they see when they come across something like this, which starts poor and crashes:

The ‘appetite for joy’ which pervades all creation, that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social rubric.  (Ch. 30)

Here’s one that starts pretty well:

His thought had been unsuspended; he was becoming ill with thinking; eaten out with thinking, withered by thinking; scourged out of all his former pulsating flexuous domesticity.  (Ch. 36)

The Latinate weirdisms like “vague lucubrations over the social rubric” are one side of Hardy’s bad writing.  They always belong to the narrator.  The other side is also always the narrator’s fault.

Like all who have been previsioned by suffering, she could, in the words of M. Sully-Prudhomme, hear a penal sentence in the fiat, ‘You shall be born,’ particularly is addressed to potential issue of hers.  (Ch. 36)

Her future children, that last phrase means, although that’s nothing compared to the four sentences of indirection in Chapter 5 in which the narrator tries to say but not say that Tess has a big chest.  But I am here more interested in the strange intrusion of the irrelevant, alien reference, so odd in a novel about a milkmaid.

If before going to the d’Urbervilles’ she [Tess] had vigorously moved under the guidance of sundry gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to the world in general, no doubt she would never have been imposed on.  But it had not been in Tess’s power – nor is it in anybody’s power – to feel the whole truth if golden opinions while it is possible to profit by them.  She – and how many more – might have ironically said to God with Saint Augustine: ‘Thou hast counselled a better course than Thou hast permitted.’  (Ch. 15)

Within a page there are quotations from Roger Ascham and Jeremy Taylor.  If only Tess had spent more time with their gnomic texts!  The way to save the narrator, both his vile style and private references, is to break him off from Hardy a bit, to make the narrator part of the argument of the novel.  Make him a little nuts. I can kind of see how to do it.

The other way to go is to ignore him, I guess, to just focus on big, vital Tess, who overshadows the narrator, the other characters, and even the landscape.  The people who love the novel love Tess.

All right, that’s out of my system. Forward.

Satires of Circumstance - Thomas Hardy visits some graves

Satires of Circumstance, Thomas Hardy, 1914.  A great book.  “Channel Firing,” “The Convergence of the Twain,” “God’s Funeral,” “The Workbox.”  The “Poems of 1912-13” sequence, for his deceased wife, and many more poems tracing their love affair and marriage from the beginning, decades earlier.  Plenty of fun for the reader of Hardy’s novels, too, with lots of moments and characters that look familiar.  The first poem, “In Front of the Landscape,” at times sounds like a tribute or farewell to Hardy’s characters:

Later images too did the day unfurl me,
           Shadowed and sad,
Clay cadavers of those who had shared in the dramas,
            Laid now at ease,
Passions all spent, chiefest the one of the broad brow
            Sepulture-clad.

Although Hardy as likely meant real people, or a new set of imaginary people to kill off.  The poems are full of the dead, full of graves, possibly even too many graves.  The last two poems are set at graves.  The last poem in the next-to-last section is set at Hardy’s grave, and he was alive.

“The Moth-Signal” is another Wessex poem.  Just like in The Return of the Native, a moth (“the pale-winged token”) is used to signal a nighttime rendezvous, this time adulterous.  The lovers do not know they are observed:

Then grinned the Ancient Briton
    From the tumulus treed with pine:
‘So, hearts are thwartly smitten
   In these days as mine!’  (ll. 33-6)

Ancient graves, new graves, graves everywhere.  Two poems are about the graves of cats. In one of them, the cat is buried among other graves, ancient Roman ones:

‘Here say you that Caesar’s warriors lie? –
But my little white cat was my only friend!
Could she but live, might the record die
Of Caesar, his legions, his aims, his end!’  (ll. 17-20, “The Roman Gravemounds”)

“The Workbox” follows, with a carpenter making his wife a sewing box out of the scraps from a coffin:

‘The shingled pattern that seems to cease
    Against your box’s rim
Continues right on in the piece
    That’s underground with him.’  (ll. 13-16)

The wife is freaked out, perhaps by her husband’s placidity in the presence of death, possibly for other reasons.  “The Workbox” is much-assigned to youngsters for mangling and explication, so a quick poke at the internet turned up lots of ideas I had never considered.  Maybe the carpenter murdered the dead man.  Maybe the wife murdered him.  One of my favorites, regardless.

Hardly is brilliantly musical in this book, his “fulth of numbers freaked with musical closes” as he says in a tribute to and parody of  Swinburne (“A Singer Asleep”), even if I have not given many such examples.

      Between the folding sea-downs,
                  In the gloom
      Of a wailful wintry nightfall,
                When the boom
Of the ocean, like a hammering in a hollow tomb…  (ll. 1-5, “The Re-enactment”)

O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea,
And the woman riding high above with bright hair flapping free –
The woman whom I loved so, and who loyally loved me.  (ll. 1-3, “Beeny Cliff,” )

        Over the mirrors meant
        To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.  (ll. 7-9, “The Convergence of the Twain”)

Looking ahead, Hardy’s poetry books stay pretty strong, don’t they?  Surely not this strong.

Thomas Hardy's independent world of ephemerons - featuring real skellington bones

My favorite moment in The Return of the Native.  A Celtic barrow has been opened, and the pagan spoils looted.  One of the protagonists, Clym Yeobright, was there.  “’Mr. Yeobright had got one pot of the bones, and was going to bring ‘em home – real skellington bones – but ‘twas ordered otherwise.’”  He gives the burial urn, full of bones, to his sweetheart who “’has a cannibal taste for such churchyard furniture.’”

When Clym came home, which was shortly after, his mother said in a curious tone, ‘The urn you had meant for me you gave away.’  (III, 3)

Hardy is grim, sure, macabre, even, but hilarious.

The entanglements and resentments of these three characters form much of the plot of the novel.  For some reason Hardy does not think the disposition of old bones is motivation enough, so he comes up with another device.  At this point the novel becomes either cleverly plotted or contrived or both depending on one’s tastes.

A minor character, an idiot, is supposed to deliver some money.  On the way, as in a fairy tale, he wins a raffle – his prize is a lady’s dress – and becomes fired up with the idea of luck, so he gambles away all of the money, which is not his, in a dice game.  Then the winner gambles away all of the money to a third character, who delivers the money but not quite correctly.  This is the beginning of a chain of events leading to the novel’s climactic wet catastrophe.

Gambling is among the worst plot devices for a fiction writer, the most arbitrary way to solve a plotting problem, which is why it is aggravating and ingenious that Hardy doubles the gambling.  Not only is there no such thing as luck in the plot, which is entirely under the control of the author, but there is no luck even within the world of the novel.  Only Fate.  The unlikely outcomes of the gambling are just more of “’the cruel satires that Fate loves to indulge in,’” (III, 5) as another character says.

The gambling scene is made as weird as possible, set at night among the giant ferns, the wild horses watching the game, which is completed to the light of glowworms.

He probed the glowworms with a bit of stick, and rolled them over, till the bright side of their tails was upwards.

‘There’s light enough.  Throw on,’ said Venn.  (III, 8)

Again, this is some kind of fantasy world.

I return to the old woman out on the heath on a hot August day:

Occasionally she came to a spot where independent worlds of ephemerons were passing their time in a mad carousal, some in the air, some on the hot ground and vegetation, some in the tepid and stringy water of a nearly-dried pool.  All the shallower ponds had decreased to a vaporous mud, amid which the maggoty shapes of innumerable obscene creatures could be indistinctly seen, heaving and wallowing with enjoyment.  (IV, 5)

After this point, as the plot began to squeeze the characters hard, there were times when I wondered why Hardy was writing a novel.  Why not a book of geology or entomology, but fictional, with the laws of nature under his control?  And he would answer, What do you think this book is?

How about a holiday break - next post on Monday.

The Return of the Native as a fantasy novel - Black chaos comes

The heath-dwellers are gathered around a bonfire built atop a Celtic barrow.

… it is pretty well known that such blazes as this the heathmen were now enjoying are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention of popular feeling about Gunpowder Plot.  (I, 3)

The heathmen themselves, not just their bonfires, are lineal descendants of Druids and Saxons.

Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the Earth say, Let there be light.

The characters are enacting a ritual, casting a spell, protecting themselves, and it seems the world, from the oncoming winter.  Or so the narrator seems to think.  It is always the narrator who is talking this way, describing his characters as Celts or Romans, pagans.  He is a bit of an anthropologist.  The lead characters are passionate and impulsive, even to the point of destruction, while the narrator sometimes seems more interested in taking notes on their quaint customs.

Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, have in some was or other survived mediaeval doctrine.  (VI, 1)

This lecture follows a description of a Maypole.  We are almost at the end of the book, which makes this line especially irritating – Hardy, I know this already – I have been reading your novel!  But I now understand lines like this as part of Hardy’s struggle with his form, which also means a struggle with his readers as he imagines them.  He is training his readers to recognize the kind of symbolic apparatus he is constructing.  Later writers, Modernists, will not have to spend so much time repeating themselves to their well-trained, and smaller, audience.

The lead heroine, the great Eustacia Vye, is perceived to be a witch, the kind that curses people, by some of her neighbors.  She is metaphorically a witch, the kind that bewitches men, for the novel's two male leads.  I was genuinely surprised when, near the end of the novel, the neighbor who most strongly insists that Vye is a witch casts a spell on her – the accuser is herself a witch!

Seizing with tongs the image that she had made of Eustacia, she held it in the heat, and watched it as it began to waste slowly away.  And while she stood thus engaged there came from her lips a murmur of words.

It was a strange jargon – the Lord’s Prayer repeated backwards…  (V, 8)

Never before had Hardy reminded me so strongly of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and that was before I got to this scene.

The Return of the Native is as close to what we now call a fantasy novel as any novel I know that is not normally called a fantasy novel.  One character is red, literally red.  The weird environment is full of ferns and strange flowers, and mysterious creatures called “heath-croppers” wander through it.  They are semi-wild horses, but the novel would be no different if they were unicorns, or dinosaurs, if the magic were “real,” which in some sense it is, and if the red man were some kind of gnome rather than a man who makes his living dying sheep.

The novel makes more sense thought of this way.

It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities - landscape and form in The Return of the Native

The form of The Return of the Native is a strange experiment of Hardy’s, an attempt to mesh the novel with a five act play and the classical unities, yet also aligning the pacing, and even the chronology, with that of the novel’s serialization.  I take the experiment as a big success, clever and effective.

Thus the first quarter of the novel is one long action that covers not much more than twenty-four hours, introducing all of the major characters but one (and announcing that one – the native who returns in Act II, scrambling the status quo).

The starting date is November 5, Bonfire Night, a blend of Guy Fawkes Day and a pagan celebration.  The entire novel covers a year, or just a bit more.  Hardy pegs the big scenes to holidays whenever he can.  Or if no holiday is available, how about something astronomical:

While he watched the far-removed landscape a tawny stain grew into being on the lower verge: the eclipse had begun.  This marked a preconcerted moment; for the remote celestial phenomenon had been pressed into sublunary service as a lover’s signal.  (IV, 4)

The seasons and holidays provide one logical structure, the five “acts” or big scenes another.  Yet Hardy keeps things loose.  The Zola novel I am reading now, Nana (1880), is stricter – one chapter is usually one scene.  Hardy allows himself more cuts and edits.

The first chapter is all landscape, the place first, not the people.  Egdon Heath, a semi-fictional semi-wilderness, empty of humans for four pages, the sun setting, the bonfires not yet lit.

In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time.  It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen…  The obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternisation towards which each advanced half-way.  (I, 1)

Those last two lines are the psychology of many of Hardy’s romantic couples projected onto the landscape, or in this novel vice versa.

The description is so strange.  Hardy moves so quickly to metaphor.  No one is expected to visualize the landscape, but rather to see it in some other imaginative sense.  For example, it is personified in several ways.  The heath is a Titan who has “waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries.”  What is it waiting for?  “[O]ne last crisis  - the final overthrow.” 

It had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.

Civilisation was its enemy.  Ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the formation.

Hardy’s imagination is simultaneously mythic and geological, even is his geology is wrong.  It must be wrong – no change since “the beginning of vegetation,” that can’t be true can it?  Well, it is true in this novel, for this place.

Chapter 2 is titled “Humanity appears upon the scene, hand in hand with Trouble.”  Its first line is “Along the road walked an old man.”  Those tragical possibilities suggested by Egdon Heath begin to become actual and the story begins.

“But I am getting used to the horror of my existence.” - Thomas Hardy in a sentence, plus more metal Hardy from The Return of the Native

Am I a good reader of Thomas Hardy’s novel?  I most surely am not!  Please keep that in mind for the next few days as I work on The Return of the Native (1878).

The difference of temperaments is one problem:

“But I am getting used to the horror of my existence.”  (Book Fifth, Ch. 9)

This line comes near the end of the novel, after an unlikely catastrophe.  Reading this line, am I supposed to burst into laughter?  That is what I did.

But here is what follows after that line:

“They say that a time comes when men laugh at misery through long acquaintance with it.  Surely that time will soon come to me!”

Wait, maybe I am supposed to laugh.  Maybe my temperament is not so different from Hardy’s.  I always get along well with his poetry, which I think of as a purer expression of his self.

I have no problem with the poetry of The Return of the Native, by which I mostly mean imagery in heightened language.  It is the hottest day of the year, and an old woman is wandering around on the exposed heath:

She looked at the sky overhead, and saw that the sapphirine hue of the zenith in spring and early summer had completely gone, and was replaced by a metallic violet.  (V, 5)

The language, and her perceptivity, reflects her heightened emotional state:

There lay the cat asleep on the bare gravel of the path, as if beds, rugs, and carpets were unendurable.  The leaves of the hollyhocks hung like half-closed umbrellas, the sap almost simmered in the stems, and foliage with a smooth surface glared like metallic mirrors…  among the fallen apples on the ground beneath were wasps rolling drunk with the juice, or creeping about the little caves in each fruit which they had eaten out before stupefied by its sweetness.  (V, 5)

The great flexibility of the novel can be seen here.  A painter cannot speculate, by means of simile, on the motivation of the cat, nor can he move inside the hollyhocks or describe the state of mind of the wasps.  What does the repetition of the word “metallic” mean, to the character, or the narrator?

In the next chapter, the same character, still out on the heath, sees a symbolic heron:

He had come dripping wet from some pool in the valleys, and as he flew the edges and lining of his wings, his thighs, and his breast were so caught by the bright sunbeams that he appeared as if formed of burnished silver.  Up in the zenith where he was seemed a free and happy place, away from all contact with the earthly ball to which she was pinioned; and she wished that she could arise uncrushed from its surface and fly as he flew then.  (V, 6)

Again, metallic, using different words, and a return to the zenith from the beginning of the previous chapter, now invested by the character with enormous meaning.  “Pinioned” is a funny word here, not quite a pun but a return to the old meaning of the word.

When we next meet the woman, she has gotten her wish, or perhaps a grotesque parody of her wish.

This side of Hardy I am reading all right, I guess.

the flicker, not the flame - E. A. Robinson's favorite poets

Edwin Arlington Robinson made a useful move in The Children of the Night (1897), which I remind myself is his first (and also second) book – he included a series of poems paying tribute to his influences.  Perhaps “tribute” is not the right word.  They are mostly sonnets, scattered through the book, just like the Tilbury Town poems.  They are character sketches, except the drunk is not an inhabitant of a little Maine town but is Paul Verlaine, dead in 1896:

Why do you dig like long-clawed scavengers
To touch the covered corpse of him that fled
The uplands for the fens, and rioted
Like a sick satyr with doom’s worshippers?  (from “Verlaine”)

It’s an attack on gossip about artists, really – “let the worms be its biographers.”

The other poems about writers: “Zola,” “Walt Whitman”, “For Some Poems by Matthew Arnold,” “For a Book by Thomas Hardy,” “Thomas Hood,” and most importantly “George Crabbe.”

Hardy is a kindred pessimistic spirit, although I would not guess that from the poem, which is almost cheery:

Then, through a magic twilight from below,
I heard its grand sad song as in a dream:
Life’s wild infinity of mirth and woe
It sang me…

But of course it cheers the pessimist to meet someone who feels the same way.  Earlier he says that Hardy helps him escape pursuit by “hordes of eyeless phantoms,” whatever that means.  I wish I knew which book Robinson meant, but the answer is likely any of them, all of them.  That line about “mirth and woe” is a fine tribute.

George Crabbe is Robinson’s great precursor , at least of the Tilbury Town poems.  Crabbe’s books The Borough (1810) and Tales (1812), among others, describe small town life in England.  Crabbe’s stories are not universally grim, but the best ones like “Peter Grimes” sure are.  He usually needs three to four hundred lines to tell a story, a contrast with Robinson’s sonnets.  He is highly readable.

The most depressing thing about Robinson’s “George Crabbe” is his sense, likely true, that Crabbe is unread:

Give him the darkest inch your shelf allows,
Hide him in lonely garrets, if you will, -

My volumes of Crabbe are on the most prominent shelf in the house, between William Cowper and Rubén Darío, but set that aside:

Whether or not we read him, we can feel
From time to time the vigor of his name
Against us like a finger for the shame
And emptiness of what our souls reveal
In books that are as altars where we kneel
To consecrate the flicker, not the flame.

I have been revisiting Crabbe to remind myself of what he is like, and I think Robinson is overegging the pudding a little there, but I suppose he is also thinking about himself, unknown and self-published.

The poems about poets are not as vivid as the Tilbury poems but they sure are useful.  Editions of Robinson’s selected poems neglect these poems, including just a few of them, or none.  They are not the best reason to read Robinson, but are a good reason to read The Children of the Night as such.

Thomas Hardy as eco-poet - my tusky ones vanish

Writing about Hardy’s theodicy poems I included a couple that were also ecological poems, or something close to it.  Proto-ecological.  “By the Earth’s Corpse,” for pity’s sake.  Hardy’s imagination is well suited to ecology: he is attentive to both nature and time, to natural cycles and to human-made change.  Time, to Hardy, is long.

His ecological sense provides an answer to his question about evil.  In “The Mother Mourns” (PPP), the poet, wandering in the Wessex woods, overhears Nature herself “breathing in aërie accents, / With dirgelike refrain”:

‘No more such!...  My species are dwindling,
    My forests grow barren,
My popinjays fail froim their trappings,
    My larks from their strain.
‘My leopardine beauties are rarer,
    My tusky ones vanish,
My children have aped mine own slaughter
    To quicken my wane.  (ll. 73-80)

Nature says that she will surrender, abandoning the earth to the slime molds:

Let me grow, then, but mildews and mandrakes,
    And slimy distortions,
Let nevemore things good and lovely
    To me appertain’  (ll. 81-84)

The problem, Nature argues, is that Man is too intelligent:

‘I had not proposed me a Creature
    (She soughed) so excelling
All else of my kingdom in compass
    And brightness of brain’  (ll. 21-4)

On the other hand, in “In the Wood” (WP) which a subtitle says is from Hardy’s novel The Woodlanders, although strictly speaking it is not, the speaker is horrfied by the Darwinian struggle of the trees, the way they seem to actively hate each other, “[c]ombatants all!”  The narrator is happy to return to the company of people, where “at least smiles abound” and “now and then, are found / Life-loyalties.”

Let’s see, what else do I want to jot down.  Hardy’s Napoleonic poems are interesting, but perhaps they are just raw material for The Dynasts.  The poems written about – during – the 1902 Boer War are of higher interest.  They are almost all from the point of view of the “soldiers’ wives and sweetharts,” waving farewll to the troop ships or checking the lists of casualties at the War Office.  “Drummer Hodge” is an important exception.  It is almost another eco-poem.  The buried soldier, “uncoffined,” will now be a “portion of that unknown plain,” “[h]is homely Northern breast and brain” food for “some Southern tree.”

I mentioned in a comment a narrative poem (“The Rash Bride,” TL) in which a woman is driven to suicide by Christmas carolers, which is a little bit bleak, and ridiculous, and that poem is followed by one about more Christmas carolers, ghosts this time (“The Dead Quire”).  But the oddest poem in the three books I read must be “The Levelled Churchyard” (PPP), which has more ghosts, this time lamenting about the destruction of their ancient cemetery by “zealous Churchmen’s pick and plane.”  It is another eco-poem, really, although the ecology is that of the ghost:

‘We late-lamented, resting here,
    Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
    “I know not which I am!”

***

‘Where we are huddled none can trace,
    And if our names remain,
They pave some path or porch or place
    Where we have never lain!’  (ll. 5-8, 13-16)

Pretty funny.